The hapless House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s path to the House speakership is involving making deals with some real devils. In order to get that seat, he’s apparently agreeing to be speaker in name only with the worst of the worst in his conference calling all the shots. That starts with agreeing to make it easier for the maniacs to oust him if he strays from the path they set out for him.
The California Republican has agreed to making the process for booting him easier. According to CNN, six sources say he has agreed to lowering the threshold of members required to force a vote on the “motion to vacate the chair,” basically a no confidence vote. That’s the mechanism that the Freedom Caucus used to force out former Speaker John Boehner in 2015—they didn’t have the vote, but the threat of one was enough to secure Boehner’s resignation. When Democrats took over in 2019, they changed the rule to require a majority of either of the House party conferences to bring the motion to the floor.
They are talking about lowering that threshold to just five members, according to CNN’s Melanie Zanona’s reporting—five being the same number of ultra-far right members who are in the “never Kevin” caucus, and five being the number of Republicans that could work with Democrats on discharge petitions that would force bills to the floor. That’s the only way Democrats or the supposed moderate Republicans would have to advance a legislative agenda. So it would take five Republicans to give Democrats power, and five to take out McCarthy; as Zanona says “mutually assured destruction.” She also reports that “some McCarthy critics tell me they think 5 is still too high,” for the motion to vacate threshold. Whereas some of the not-as-radical Republicans think the threshold needs to be set at 50.
RELATED STORY: McCarthy’s political life continues to be hell. Just what he deserves
It’s hard to see the five hardliners who have McCarthy’s future in the palm of their hand right now—he can only win the speakership if four of them relent and vote for him—agreeing to anything less. One of them is this guy, the only declared challenger to McCarthy at the moment.
And this guy, who is showing no inclination of backing down:
Speaking of Rep. Jim Jordan (who does not want to be speaker because he now has the Judiciary Committee megaphone), he might be having to share the witch-hunting limelight with a new select committee yet another group of hardliners is demanding. Jordan’s premature release of oversight demands to the Biden administration wasn’t enough to compel the White House to pay attention, or to keep other House Republicans from wanting to get in on the action.
They want a freewheeling committee with scope to investigate pretty much everything they are calling “weaponized government.” It’s all the stuff that Jordan and incoming Oversight Committee Chair James Comer have already said they’re “investigating”: the FBI, the Justice Department, the IRS, and Anthony Fauci. Oh, and the Department of Education and Homeland Security and Hunter Biden’s laptop. And the intelligence officials who warned that the Hunter Biden laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Which makes the irony of these guys saying they are modeling this proposed select committee after the 1970s Church Committee even sharper. That was the storied committee convened in 1975 and chaired by Sen. Frank Church, which held a series of hearings and published 14 reports as it investigated the legality of intelligence operations by the CIA, NSA, and FBI, including attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, spying on Martin Luther King Jr., and monitoring the political activities of other U.S. citizens. The Church Committee resulted in the creation of the permanent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, intended as a check on the intelligence communities domestic surveillance powers. The Church Committee was intent on protecting the privacy and civil liberties of Americans and ending the rampant lawlessness of the intelligence agencies.
So, no, none of these people have the stature to even utter the name “Frank Church,” and they sure as hell don’t have any sense of the history and the import of what that committee did. What they’re envisioning setting up, and what McCarthy is apparently endorsing, is even more ironic because it’s another McCarthy and another proposed witch hunt.
One, by the way, that the other guys McCarthy needs to keep on his side don’t appreciate. That would be Jordan and Comer, who have already claimed that turf. “I feel like we’ve got enough committees already to do all of that. I’m pretty passionate about that. I feel like you’ve got a Judiciary and Intelligence Committee that are very capable of doing that,” Comer said. “I’m not a big select committee or special counsel kind of guy.”
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The California Republican has agreed to making the process for booting him easier. According to CNN, six sources say he has agreed to lowering the threshold of members required to force a vote on the “motion to vacate the chair,” basically a no confidence vote. That’s the mechanism that the Freedom Caucus used to force out former Speaker John Boehner in 2015—they didn’t have the vote, but the threat of one was enough to secure Boehner’s resignation. When Democrats took over in 2019, they changed the rule to require a majority of either of the House party conferences to bring the motion to the floor.
They are talking about lowering that threshold to just five members, according to CNN’s Melanie Zanona’s reporting—five being the same number of ultra-far right members who are in the “never Kevin” caucus, and five being the number of Republicans that could work with Democrats on discharge petitions that would force bills to the floor. That’s the only way Democrats or the supposed moderate Republicans would have to advance a legislative agenda. So it would take five Republicans to give Democrats power, and five to take out McCarthy; as Zanona says “mutually assured destruction.” She also reports that “some McCarthy critics tell me they think 5 is still too high,” for the motion to vacate threshold. Whereas some of the not-as-radical Republicans think the threshold needs to be set at 50.
RELATED STORY: McCarthy’s political life continues to be hell. Just what he deserves
It’s hard to see the five hardliners who have McCarthy’s future in the palm of their hand right now—he can only win the speakership if four of them relent and vote for him—agreeing to anything less. One of them is this guy, the only declared challenger to McCarthy at the moment.
And this guy, who is showing no inclination of backing down:
Speaking of Rep. Jim Jordan (who does not want to be speaker because he now has the Judiciary Committee megaphone), he might be having to share the witch-hunting limelight with a new select committee yet another group of hardliners is demanding. Jordan’s premature release of oversight demands to the Biden administration wasn’t enough to compel the White House to pay attention, or to keep other House Republicans from wanting to get in on the action.
They want a freewheeling committee with scope to investigate pretty much everything they are calling “weaponized government.” It’s all the stuff that Jordan and incoming Oversight Committee Chair James Comer have already said they’re “investigating”: the FBI, the Justice Department, the IRS, and Anthony Fauci. Oh, and the Department of Education and Homeland Security and Hunter Biden’s laptop. And the intelligence officials who warned that the Hunter Biden laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Which makes the irony of these guys saying they are modeling this proposed select committee after the 1970s Church Committee even sharper. That was the storied committee convened in 1975 and chaired by Sen. Frank Church, which held a series of hearings and published 14 reports as it investigated the legality of intelligence operations by the CIA, NSA, and FBI, including attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, spying on Martin Luther King Jr., and monitoring the political activities of other U.S. citizens. The Church Committee resulted in the creation of the permanent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, intended as a check on the intelligence communities domestic surveillance powers. The Church Committee was intent on protecting the privacy and civil liberties of Americans and ending the rampant lawlessness of the intelligence agencies.
So, no, none of these people have the stature to even utter the name “Frank Church,” and they sure as hell don’t have any sense of the history and the import of what that committee did. What they’re envisioning setting up, and what McCarthy is apparently endorsing, is even more ironic because it’s another McCarthy and another proposed witch hunt.
One, by the way, that the other guys McCarthy needs to keep on his side don’t appreciate. That would be Jordan and Comer, who have already claimed that turf. “I feel like we’ve got enough committees already to do all of that. I’m pretty passionate about that. I feel like you’ve got a Judiciary and Intelligence Committee that are very capable of doing that,” Comer said. “I’m not a big select committee or special counsel kind of guy.”
RELATED STORIES:
Jim Jordan tried to jump the gun on oversight requests; Biden White House tells him to pound sand
GOP holds first press conference and says it only wants to talk about Hunter Biden's laptop
At least 34 members of Congress texted Mark Meadows to declare willingness to participate in coup
Ethics gone awry: Jan. 6 probe calls for ethics probe of GOP leader McCarthy, 3 fellow GOP lawmakers